Benioff "got" the importance of mobile APIs early on. Anyone who has been to Dreamforce can see the energy of the developer community that Salesforce has courted. What else can Salesforce do to distinguish itself, developers?

Salesforce.com's "Interenet of Customers" yarn is a big high-concept for me. It's more about wrapping everything up, exposing it through APIs and mobile and delivering something that's "more than the sum of its parts," as Rymer put it. Forrester's surveys show that SFDC is the #4 cloud "platform" behind AWS, Microsoft, and Google, according to Rymer. If Azure has more cloud platform recognition than Force.com, Salesforce really had to do something to create a stronger platform identity.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.